3 ways to improve your presentations

Hey, everybody. Drew McLellan here from Agency Management Institute this week coming to you from home in Denver, Colorado. You know, one of the cool things about our profession, and certainly about the work that we do, is that we get to do a ton of public speaking. And when I say public speaking, I don't necessarily mean giving a keynote at a conference –although there certainly is that opportunity – doesn't necessarily mean we're on a stage in front of thousands of people. We literally, as agency leaders and owners, get to give presentations every single day. Maybe one-on-one conversations with an employee or a client, could be in a small group setting. Or it could be that we step on a stage, formal or informal, and talk to a larger group. Regardless of the size of the audience, we want to make sure that our presentation is impactful and memorable, and that we get our key points across to our audience.

So I want to give you three tips today on how to be a better speaker. First one is around eye contact. Eye contact: we're taught – we're taught that we should make, sort of sweeping gestures through a room to have everyone in the audience feel like we're talking to them. But rather than pinpointing, like, the back wall or a big group of people, the best way to do that, the best way to create that intimacy with your audience is to actually pick three people, one to your left, one kind of dead center to you and one to your right. And actually make eye contact with those people. To the rest of the audience it feels like you're looking at them, too. So again, you're going to want to do that sort of periodically, and you're going to want to vary the pattern. So you might start over here and then go all the way over here and then go to the center. And that may be back here and then over here again. So you don't want to just rotate like a machine gun sort of scattering like this but way back and forth. You want to mix it up just like you would in a normal conversation, where you would be making different eye contact and having different points of view shared with different people at different times. So that's tip number one. Three people in the audience – could be the audience could be as small as five people, or it could be 5000 people. But pick three people that are strategically located that are going to give you that intimacy of that eye contact. I know for me, I often will end up choosing people who are sort of physically engaging in what I'm talking about. They’re the smilers, the nodders, the people who are giving you something back. So that for me, that helps me sort of anchor the people that I want to talk to. So that's tip number one.

Tip number two is to actually construct your speech or your message in threes. Our brains are actually hard wired to remember things and to see the pattern of three. So it might be three chapters to a message or three core messages or three takeaways. But think about as you're structuring the message that you want to deliver, how you might be able to do that in a pattern of three to help your audience retain what you have to say. And the last one is the power of a pause So when you make an important point, one of the most powerful ways that you can cement that point in the mind of your audience or in the heart of your audience, depending on the point, is to give it a pause. That pause of 3 to 5 seconds, which feels like a long time. But by giving that pause and letting them absorb what you just said, it gives added weight to the message. So the pause is as powerful as the words that precede the pause. By giving that just that boom, boom, boom, that one, two, three, you allow them to absorb that message.

So again, pick three audience members strategically located in your audience and make eye contact directly with them. Number two, create the structure of your speech, keeping in mind the power of bunching ideas or concepts or takeaways in threes. And number three, the pause. Use the power of the pause – 3 to 5 seconds after a key point to allow your audience to really soak that in. If you apply those three practices to your speeches, big and small, I think you're going to be thrilled at how powerful and effective they can be.

All right? See you next week.